BLS, BLAKE2, IPv6, CF, UAPI, Microservices

1. BLS digital signature (@ Wikipedia) BLS (Boneh–Lynn–Shacham) yet another type of EC digital signatures. 

2. Interesting, I've used BLAKE2b (@ Wikipedia) with key & person parameters for random generation for a long time. But now it seems that Linux ended up doing exactly the same. Yet they're using BLAKE2s. I've generally used 512 bit pool, instead of 128 bits. No further details, but their selected options sound very similar to my preferences. Also /dev/random and /dev/urandom both now point to urandom and random doesn't block anymore. Full post about linux-rng-5.17-5.18 (@ zx2c4.com).

3. Just wondering if IPv6 isn't popular in Asia or ... Maybe using tunnel to Hong Kong helps to circumvent some restrictions? Of course it also provides static addresses which is obviously valuable, but just guessing and wondering. Reason for these questions is that the Hong Kong tunnelbroker.net (@ Wikipedia) POP is the most popular tunnel end-point.

4. Cloudflare @ China, DNS improvements (@ blog.cloudflare.com) - Really interesting post. Nothing special though, market specific optimization and solutions to improve user experience.

5. It seems that there's a whole generation which is so used to IPv4 related NAT problems and prefer cloud services that they don't even understand the benefits of direct and full IPv6 end to end networking connectivity between devices.

6. Got slightly confused, all files except one large binary file got same hash. Yet verifying the directory with ocs-chkimg it says it's good, even if there's something different and all references are the same. Clonezilla disk images. This is kind of annoying, reminds me from Duplicati, where backup is good, everything is great when you run test. Except the minor fact that restoring that backup set fails and data is lost. Uh oh...

7. Universal integration API (UAPI), SMTP, just send email, and well process it... Very nice and good classic API which has worked well for decades? It's just transport for data, which can be formatted quite freely as text. No don't ask me, why I got reminded about this again.

8. Absolutely wonderful post about microservices: Microservices: Why Are We Doing This? (@ michaeldehaan.substack.com). Hmm... "Code sharing across languages is also completely lost, as basic functions must be reinvented, sometimes with unfortunately differing business logic!" - In general, excellent post! Sometimes it's wonderful how things that should take minutes or hours, end up taking months and years. Yet that's also process / people problem. Get the thing designed, implemented, tested and it's done. But, on every stage there seems to be ridiculous confusion with some projects. And when it's done, then they decide it's not what they want. Ahem, so much joy!

9. Classic fun, so classic fun. I'll just quickly change the sudoers file... Ahh done, oops, I just saved it with typo. So much joy. Ok, easy to fix, but once again fail that should be avoided by the process even before it happens! Ref: visudo

10. Today I noticed that times are changing. Even national main TV news had QR codes, which redirect users to their web-site. In good old times, magazines were full of TV redirections, now TV is full of web redirections. Which simply means that TV is becoming obsolete and is already being seriously downplayed.

11. Something not so different? Wondering the first engineering test images taken by the James Webb Telescope I ended up wondering the six spikes on the star, first I thought it would be about the hexagonal mirrors, but that's wrong. There's a very clear and technical reason for the spikes, those are diffraction spikes (@ Wikipedia) and the number of spikes vary based on multiple factors. Magnetohydrodynamic drive (MHD) (@ Wikipedia). Interesting technology, but doesn't seem to be very useful at least with sea water.

2023-06-11